Charlotte Graham-Cumming

B2B marketing agency IceBlueSky has adopted a community approach to its supply chain, including its printers. Director Charlotte Graham-Cumming, an Ipex speaker, explains that both agency and print suppliers have benefited.

It is tempting to think of agencies and printers as being very different animals: agency types being gregarious and creative, printers so technical and focused. These are stereotypes, and though there has been many a funloving printer over the years, stereotypes do tend to be grounded in some degree of truth. It should not necessarily mean that printers and agencies find it difficult to communicate with each other, but it has alas often been the case. 

Charlotte Graham-Cumming does not want to work that way. A director of the B2B marcomms agency Ice Blue Sky, she has pursued a community approach to working with printing companies and other suppliers to the agency in areas such as telemarketing, PR, enterprise software, and creative services such as animation, video, and 3D design.

It is something she believes in strongly and it makes good sense from a number of perspectives.

‘We took this approach right from the beginning when we started the agency in 2007. Before that, I was running marketing for a big software company and I had a couple of agencies supporting me in that role. What I found frustrating in dealing with a big agency was that the service levels varied dramatically once you went outside their core skill set. 

‘So we started with a view to using specialists and that’s why we came up with the community. It is also partly financial, in terms of keeping the core team small but allowing us to work on some sizeable projects by bringing in people that are highly skilled at what they do.

‘I think you get much better quality when you bring in specialists. We don’t have formal agreements with suppliers but we keep it natural and we feel we are both getting something from it. It works very well. We are very up front with customers that we have this partner network and it means that our customers get access to really great skill levels that they would not necessarily get from a single company.’

There are four printing companies within this community, one litho, one digital, and two that are used for specific areas, one being packaging. Ms Graham-Cumming believes that both sides, agency and printer, could do more to understand each other’s issues.

‘Marketing and creative don’t understand the potential of print, that printers can handle variable data to the extent that they can, for example. There are all these advances from the last five to ten years that I did not know about until working closely with Konica Minolta,’ she said. ‘The print industry talks about what it does and the creative industry understands it differently.

An agency will go to a printer with a request and he will get frustrated because the agency is not giving him what he needs, but the agency doesn’t know what he needs. I think that can be avoided though and with a little bit of understanding from both sides there’s a massive opportunity there to add value.’

She added that printers could be more proactive in terms of telling agencies what they have to offer, understanding what agencies are going through and where the gaps are. For instance, most agencies dislike dealing with data and, knowing that, the printer could take that off their hands. She is looking for a willingness to communicate from her print suppliers. Agencies, meanwhile, also need to be more open and get printers involved earlier in the pitch process.

How resistant is the relationship with her print suppliers to a cheap quote from elsewhere? ‘I’m nervous about cheap print and tend not to make decisions based on price,’ she replied. ‘I always say to customers, if you want it to look like that, this is what you will have to pay. Sometimes they go for that and sometimes they don’t, but personally I believe that if you’re going to take the time to print something you should do it properly.’

By forging a good relationship with an agency, printers can make their services less price-driven and more value-driven, she said. They can become the trusted right hand man, the man with the solutions. What printer would not want to embrace such an opportunity?